It’s that a dream might come true : excerpts from worlds we have lost
~ William MacLeish, The Day Before America:
As the day before America approached, the dichotomies of Western civilization intensified. Whole institutions fell into decay. Corrupt churchmen put a price on anything from indulgences to fake relics, and popes scurried about finding sinecures for their “nephews.” Few roads were safe from briggands, and travelers went in groups or prayed a lot. The English mistreated Catholics, Jews, and other Others and engaged in organized decimation of those in Ireland who chose to take a stand against them.
At the broad bottom of society, the peasantry and the urban poor lived lives I read about but cannot imagine. Historians tell me not to apply the mores of my times to those of the past, but I crave exception here. Callousness is callousness in any century, and one of the few pervasive evidences of human nobility I can extract from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is the ability of so many people to suffer so much.
I do not forget the high culture of those years — Michelangelo, Titian, Leonardo. True enough, and Sir Thomas Moore and Machiavelli and so many other mastsers of the mind, all touched by the energies of a European civilization gone rampant. The historian Barbara Tuchman took note of all this exaltation of the creative and the settings from which it sprang. “The efflorescence in culture reflected no comparable surge of human behavior,” she wrote, “but rather an astonishing debasement.”
From these cruel smelters was to come another work of high imagination: man the exalted, man the manipulator of his fate. This was definitely an upper-class concept. Only wealthy, powerful males need apply. God was still very much in evidence, a transcendent male deity. But the best of men were now to be free to make their destinies manifest. Beneath them in this developing bell curve of being were lesser men, all women, animals, and — most alien, most feared — the surviving forests of the land.
Peasants and others living closer to nature could and did retain a more inclusive view of the world. They could dance to bring back the sun and sprinkle fields with cakes and drink. They went to the woods to get — to poach, when necessary — fuel and fodder and the occasional roebuck. And they returned with fresh respect for the wild men who lived there, the Little People, the bears with fiery cinders in their mouths, all the beings who shared their realities.
The mighty took another course. Some were aware that Plato himself had argued against the value of myth in culture, against the sorcery and spirits that informed the great tales of Homer. Most held to the value of the analytical mind, the supremacy of reason. And that seems reasonable to me. If the beginnings of the analytical mind are to be found far back in the first permanent settlements, then as settlements became city-states, was it not natural to turn to ever more sophisicticated mental constructs? How else to impose order on such proliferations of neighbors?
Clocks were spreading through Europe. Time could be measured. Clockwork was like the mind, precise, measuring. The way to progress lay in mechanizaetion, in logic. The new man was apart, using his vision to measure and his mind to analyze. What was seen was an object. The viewer was a subject. Thus separated, things could be properly examined, broken down to components, understood, and manipulated. The concept is exciting still. I remember how power I felt when I first encountered the elegant force of logic. It must have been exhilarating to see it sprout amid the chaos of Columbian Europe.
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